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Friday, November 5, 2010
Instead of building a fish ladder only long enough to let migrating fishes go around just a single dam, how about one that bypasses not just that one dam or all the dams on the river but the entire river itself?
Starting at the mouth of the river, this fish ladder loops and curlicues a new hydrological continuum, passing through forests and hills and even cities, doing arabesques around mountains, sometimes on stilts and sometimes tethered. Like an aqueduct staggering through the plains of Latium.
Sometimes it flows besides its parent river, which has been nearly desiccated by global warming, Aral Sea-style irrigations or over damming by energy gluttons from faraway Los Angeles and Phoenix. Awaiting the fishes at the end is a reservoir replicating their ancient spawning grounds.
Along the banks of this artificial river valley, this infrastructure of pure ethology, might be a series of public viewing areas from which to view the endangered spectacle of wild animal migration. And/or catch dinner.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Another fascinating project from Paisajes Emergentes in collaboration with Lovisa Lindström, Sara Hellgren and Sebastian Monsalve. Called Clouds, it's a proposed installation to be located in every town that will be flooded by the Ituango Hydroelectric Dam megaproject in Colombia.
Having not yet read any project statement, we can't accurately describe the actual mechanics of this installation. Nevertheless, we like what we think is the intent of the design team. That is, we're imagining this as an act of protest for environmental and social justice — which, if true, would be a refreshing change from the typical Archigram and Buckminster Fuller-inspired apocalyptic and utopian buoyant scenarios.
While cities and villages await the start of dam construction and their inevitable drowning, these ominous clouds will be deployed up to the water level of a future reservoir, forming an archipelago of artificial islands in an absent artificial lake. Their shadows will cast upon forests and mountains to be asphyxiated. They will loom high above lives about to be wrenchingly disrupted.
Since the top is leveled, locals (and perhaps disaster tourists) will hop on and ride these aerial barges. Agents from the hydroelectric company will come to educate the benefits of the dam. Politicians will come to boast this public works project as civilizing and modernizing. And environmentalists will come to praise this new source of clean energy.
But other environmentalists who have actually done their homework will come to counter the engineers and bureaucrats with the dam's monumental destructiveness. Indigenous peoples will come to protest their displacement from their ancestral lands. Downstream localities already suffering from water scarcity will come to claim their water rights. And many more will come to seek redress of unfair compensations for their lost properties.
The views of the surrounding (contested) terrains will be absolutely picturesque, but the air will be highly charged. One false move from any of the factions and things will combust.
But what are they exactly? Sculptures? Follies? Floating parks? Pavilions?
Pavilloons™?
In the aftermath of the deluge, will they be used as diving platforms from which former residents will try to salvage what few they can of their possessions from their submerged cities? And unsurprisingly from where looters will carry out their moon fishing expeditions?
Perhaps while awaiting relocation, some of these hydro-refugees will use these platforms as temporary informal settlements, which then organize organically into permanent island cities.
Quito 1: Paisajes Emergentes
Rainwater Harvesting in Quito
A Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
Four Plazas and A Street
Balloon Park
Friday, August 8, 2008
Armatures for a fluid landscape, as photographed by Toshio Shibata.
Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers
Vicksburg Harbor Project
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The ruins of a medieval village above Barcelona, under 150 feet of water at the bottom of a reservoir since the 1960s, has “re-emerged into the light.”
An 11th-century church spire, entombed in the murky depths for decades, towers once again over dry ground. And that is because “in a year that so far ranks as Spain's driest since records began 60 years ago, the reservoir is currently holding as little as 18% of its capacity.” To make matters worse for the people depending on its waters, climate scientists have forecasted “still drier conditions to come in the approaching decades.”
So what other remnants of civilizations lie patiently waiting at the bottom of reservoirs to once again bath in the glow of the sun?
Or more interestingly, not ruins of villages or cities but a monstrous beast birthed by a landscape suffering from too much water, concocted in a toxic stew of asphyxiated forests, leftover sewage and drowned lives, incubated by climate change. Cloverfield in the Mist.
Seuthopolis
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Of all the reasons put forth against building gigantic dams, perhaps the most fantastic one we have ever heard comes from Max Brooks: if you build them, a pandemic of zombies will sweep across the globe.
Patient Zero, we read in World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, was infected when the boy and his father was out “moon fishing, a term that describes diving for treasure among sunken ruins of the Three Gorges Reservoir. With more than eleven hundred abandoned villages, towns, and even cities, there are always hope of recovering something valuable.”
Quick to disavow any appearance of illegality, the patient's mother explains that “they weren't looting, that it was their own village, Old Dachang, and they were just trying to recover some heirlooms from the remaining houses that hadn't been moved.” When the boy resurfaced, there was “a bite mark on his foot. He didn't know what had happened, the water had been too dark and muddy. His father was never seen again.”
But just what (or even who) nibbled on the boy, the author doesn't elaborate. Just as well that Brooks didn't, because it makes it easier for us to imagine another moon fisher, another hydro-refugee displaced by the gigantic dam. He, too, was trying to recover his family's possessions and then some. With each dive, however, he was slowly being poisoned to death by the slurry of asphyxiated forests, leftover sewage and drowned cities. During one night of moon fishing, he just didn't surface. He is then reanimated by a landscape suffering from too much hydrology, but before it could resurface, the remnant wall of an abandoned house topples and traps his legs. Like an anemone siphoning off the waters for plankton, he flails about now in the deep, murky artificial lake, waiting until its hands and mouth touch living flesh.
And it does snare a couple of living flesh, a father and his son. The father dies and is consumed, but the son escapes with only a nibble. After the son returns to the surface, events unfold such that in the coming months, the world gets severely depopulated; governments after governments after governments collapse; Cuba ascends as the supreme economic and military power; and an oceanic society, called the Pacific Continent, develops out of shipboard refugees.
All of which make us wonder two things:
Firstly, is the reservoir, then, some sort of a biological-warfare testing ground, where new diseases are hoped to be created and incubated? A gigantic petri dish where the toxic sludge of former civilizations mutates existing viruses into a bioweapon? (Is Lake Powell a collaboration between the Center for Disease Control and the Army Corps of Engineers?)
Secondly, are the events in World War Z a genrefication of current world events? For instance, is Max Brooks' story about China exporting phantasmagorical cargos to Africa an intended metaphor for the deepening economic and political ties between the two, a relationship with landscape and architectural consequences? Additionally, is the creeping invasion of these same cargos to North America a parallel to the increasing transoceanic reach of China's pollution to Canada and the U.S., and also a frighteningly uncanny forecast of this year's panic over tainted pet foods, poisoned toothpaste, and lead-covered Barbie dolls? Are the zombies' worldwide colonization yet another metaphor for the monumental physical effects of China's inexorable march towards preeminent global superpower on the landscape of whole continents?
Anyway, speaking of ancient cities drowned by the insatiable appetite of nations for energy, there is Hasankeyf in the Kurdish region of Turkey.
Located on the banks of the river Tigris, near the border with Iraq, Hasankeyf dates back 10-12,000 years and bears evidence of Assyrian, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk Turk and Ottoman civilizations. There are ornate mosques, Islamic tombs, cave churches, palaces, and centuries old houses carved into the limestone cliffs. And nearby is Allianoi, an ancient spa settlement dating back to the second century C.E.
All will be flooded.
A year later, a moon fisher will try to loot priceless Ottoman artifacts, searching from one cave-mosque to another, only to be bitten, infected; the pandemic then begins in earnest. It'll be a realized metaphor of an escalated Iraq War.
(For clips from Still Life, see #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5. And for another film directed by Jia Zhangke, we highly recommend The World.)
Hydrology vs. the Apocalypse
Friday, September 7, 2007
In the 1940s, archaeologists discovered the ancient city of Seuthopolis, the capital seat of the Odrysian Kingdom beginning in the 4th century BCE.
Unfortunately, the discovery came too late, because under construction nearby was a reservoir dam, which would soon flood the valley and drown “the best preserved Thracian city in modern Bulgaria.”
Now over half a century later, a project proposed by Bulgarian architect Zheko Tilev would uncover and preserve the ruins using “a circular dam wall, resembling a well on the bottom of which, as on a stage, is presented the historical epic of Seuthopolis.”
Indeed, most everything about the project is theatrical: “Approaching the surrounding ring by boat from the shore Seuthopolis is completely hidden for the eye. But the view from the wall is breathtaking - with its scale, comprehensiveness and unique point of view; from the boundary between past and present. The possibility to see the city from the height of 20 meters allows the perception of its entirety.”
Once there, and if your interest in exploring archaeological sites wanes considerably faster than expected, there are other things to do on the ring-wall. For instance, there will be restaurants, cafes, shops, bike rental facilities, and also other facilities for various recreational sports and fishing.
Programmed as “a unique modern tourist complex,” the ring-wall will also house a museum, a hotel complex, open-air exhibitions, concert and festival halls, conference centers, and hanging gardens.
It's a classic case of horror vacui, in other words.
There are three sites where this should be done as well:
1) New Orleans (i.e., having abandoned the city, its inhabitants now live and work and die on grossly heightened and fattened levees; everyone will laugh at them, but when the deluge comes, they will have the last laugh)
2) Alexandria
3) Yonaguni (i.e., if it's actually manmade)
POSTSCRIPT #1: For a different strategy than the one planned to uncover and preserve the ancient city of Seuthopolis, see the planned underwater museum of Alexandria.
